


Steady Gun Hand

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [8]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-20 07:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17618285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Infected bullet wounds and heart to heart talks while hiding out from gangsters in Indonesia: just another day on the Rand-Meachum road trip of self-discovery.





	Steady Gun Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> So this is a treat that got a little out of control ...

It had been raining all night and all day, a steady rain pattering on the tin roof of the abandoned shed where they'd been hiding out since last night. On the bright side -- which Danny was trying hard to focus on, under the circumstances -- the rain made it easy to collect safe drinking water; he had every container he could find set up under the dripping eaves.

Another aspect of the bright side was that they seemed to have lost Orson Randall's goons for the moment. The rain had washed out their trail, and was probably helping them stay hidden in the jungle where they'd taken refuge.

The downsides, on the other hand, were ... a lot. The roof leaked like a sieve, and puddles were slowly but surely turning the floor of the shed to mud. They had next to no food, no medical supplies, and Ward was growing steadily weaker and paler. His fever was back; Danny could tell just by looking at him.

Which didn't stop him from trying to boss Danny around.

"No, that's entirely wrong. Your grip's terrible." Ward was sitting on an overturned, rusted-out gas can against the shed wall, underneath the overhanging edge of the roof where they'd set up a couple of targets. It wasn't precisely _dry_ \-- nothing was dry; the world had a sort of omnipresent wetness to it -- but at least they weren't being directly rained on.

"Could you be a little more specific, Ward? 'Entirely wrong' isn't a whole lot of help."

"Hang on, I'll show you." Ward visibly gathered for the effort and heaved himself up off the gas can with a grimace. He wobbled before getting his balance, his good hand resting on the wall of the shed.

"I didn't say you should get up!" Danny protested. "You need to be resting."

Ward's only answer was an unimpressed grunt. He took hold of Danny's wrist with his good hand. The other was curled on his chest in an improvised sling. His fingers were chilly to the touch, his face white, and Danny watched him anxiously as he corrected Danny's grip on the gun. 

It was a strange turnaround for them, having Ward as the teacher and Danny the student. For weeks, Danny had been the one who was the expert, the teacher, the translator. He'd taught Ward a handful of words in Mandarin and Cantonese, had given him rudimentary training in self-defense (Ward was definitely not _good_ at it, but at least he could roll with a punch and break a chokehold now), and he had made an earnest stab at teaching Ward to meditate because _it would be good for him, dammit._

So it was interesting for him now to have _Ward's_ hands correcting his grip on the gun, Ward adjusting Danny's stance the way that just a few days ago, Danny had been doing with Ward, as they practiced hand-to-hand on an empty stretch of dockside in Jakarta before all of --

Before.

"Wrist straight," Ward said. It sounded like he was repeating things he'd been told himself, at some point in the past; Danny could almost hear the cadence of someone else's intonation (and he could guess whose) in Ward's voice. "Heel of the hand flat against the grip. You can't hold it that loosely. You're not going to have any control and you aren't braced for recoil."

"I don't think there's recoil on _my_ guns."

This drew half a smile, just a quirk of the corner of Ward's mouth. "But you still need control when you aim. You can't hold a gun like you do a sword. And you shouldn't try a one-handed grip before you learn to do it two-handed."

"But it feels like they _want_ me to use them together," Danny objected, but he brought up his other hand to support the butt of the pistol and let Ward adjust his hand positions. The cold grip of Ward's semiautomatic still felt alien and wrong, not like the grip of a sword or a staff. Not like Orson Randall's guns and the way they sat so easily in his hands, like they wanted to be there ...

"The guns want it," Ward said in a tone so dry that it seemed as if it should have sucked the moisture out of the damp air.

"Look, Ward, of all the things you've seen, _that's_ what's hard to swallow? Not the fact that my fist lights up -- _used to_ light up," he amended, trying not to feel a stab at the words, "or people coming back from the dead or --"

"What's hard to swallow is that the last and only time I saw you use these things, you keeled over like you just had a heart attack."

"Chi drain, that's all." Danny still felt a little shaky, even now, days later, but he wasn't prepared to admit it; one of them had to be the healthy one around here. Ward had made it clear anyway that he planned to sit on Danny to stop him from using the guns again until Danny acquired at least some minimal competence with firearms.

For a number of reasons, they were using Ward's gun for practice, not Orson Randall's guns, but Danny found himself glancing over at the gunbelt hanging on the wall of the shed. Ever since he'd first held the guns, it was like he could feel them pulling at him. The guns were _hungry,_ somehow. Which was one of the reasons why he'd decided it was a good idea to go along with Ward and not touch the guns any more than absolutely necessary until he gained more control over them.

"Yeah," Ward said, "well, the chi stuff is _your_ problem. My problem is making sure that you can draw them without looking like a complete idiot or accidentally shooting your fighting partner in the back. So, okay, you've got the hand positions, but you need to turn your body a little --" He nudged Danny's foot with the side of his boot, shifting Danny's feet farther apart.

This part, at least, was somewhat familiar, learning to move his body through the forms of a new discipline. He could learn. What would happen when those pistol grips were next in his hands -- that was something he hadn't really thought ahead to, yet.

He still didn't remember much of their escape on the docks, but he remembered shooting at their pursuers, and worse, the feeling that the guns had _wanted_ him to ...

"Are you paying attention to me at all?" Ward said.

"I'm listening," Danny said automatically, and then, "Okay, no, I wasn't listening."

"Well, at least I'm a more patient teacher than _he_ was." Muttered under his breath, low enough that Danny wasn't sure if he was supposed to hear. But there was a quick flash of a grin along with the words, even though it was one of Ward's sharp-edged, bitter smiles. "Okay, turn a little here --" He made a move, without really thinking about it, starting to bring up his injured arm to correct Danny's stance, and went chalk white. 

"Ward?" Danny hastily caught his shoulder, helping steer him to a seat. " _Ward._ It's not any better, is it? You're worse. Let me have a look."

"Won't help," Ward mumbled, resting his head in his other hand.

"We gotta change the bandages. Or does losing an arm sound fun to you?"

He wasn't usually that short with Ward, but it had been a crappy day, and they'd also been spending an awful lot of time in close proximity to each other lately (and a Ward getting increasingly snappish from pain and fever was, at times, hard to take, as much as Danny tried to be patient with him).

But Ward didn't protest this time, just heaved a long-suffering sigh and started working to take off the sling they'd made from his belt. Danny helped him with that and then started unwinding the bandages wrapped around Ward's upper arm. 

It had seemed, at first, a fairly clean injury; the bullet had gone right through the flesh of Ward's upper arm, with no complications along the way. It hadn't exactly been _fun_ for Danny to pick himself up off the ground and find himself covered in Ward's blood (actually it was going right up there in the top 5 worst moments of his life, but at least it had only lasted as long as it took Ward to gasp out, "I'm fine, just run!"). Other than that, and a few unplanned explosions, the warehouse heist had gone more-or-less smoothly. But that was before they'd spent three days being hunted through the jungle by Randall's goons, running out of food, with Ward getting steadily weaker.

The bandages, made from strips torn from their shirts, were crusted and stuck together. Ward sucked in his breath when Danny started trying to peel them loose. "Sorry, sorry," Danny murmured, as Ward bowed his head and gritted his teeth. Danny bent down and retrieved the beat-up can in which he'd collected moss from the edge of the jungle.

"I cannot _believe_ you're bandaging me with moss," Ward muttered, sounding slightly more like himself.

"It's antiseptic. Mildly so, anyway. We used to use this in --"

"In the mystic city of the monks, I know, please don't explain, just wrap me up in goddamn moss -- Ah!"

"Sorry," Danny murmured again, feeling sick. He discarded handfuls of soiled moss and packed the clean moss around the wound, then bandaged it as gently as he could with a fresh strip of his shirt, all too aware that it was barely cleaner than the used bandages he'd taken off, while Ward dug his fingers into his leg and stayed grimly silent. 

"Ward ... we can't keep doing this. We need to get you antibiotics, or a doctor, or _something_. It's just gonna get worse without medical help."

Ward took a shaky breath. "I'm not going to argue with you, but if you have any ideas on where to get some ..."

"There are villages around here." 

"Villages full of men with guns working for a guy who wants us dead. Look, I don't want to die of jungle rot any more than you want me to, but I also don't want to die of a bullet to the back of the head."

"Those aren't the only options, damn it, Ward." Danny took a deep breath and ran his hand over his face, feeling the scrape of three days' worth of stubble. "Look, why don't you eat something. We've still got some granola bars." He got one out of his pocket, held it hopefully in Ward's direction. "We could split one."

"Not hungry. You can have it."

"You _should_ be hungry. You oughta be starving. That's not a good sign."

Ward groaned and leaned back against the wall. "Nothing is a good sign lately, according to you. What happened to the terminally optimistic and irritatingly cheerful Danny Rand I've been following around Asia for the last three months?"

"I watched my brother take a bullet for me that's _killing_ him, that's what happened!"

It came out in a yell. He hadn't felt like he was balanced on the ragged edge of his emotions like this in a long time, not since when he first came to New York, back when he felt like a volcano about to erupt.

Ward stared at him, opened his mouth and shut it. Danny turned away, but there wasn't anything to look at other than dripping rainwater and the vivid green of the jungle. He yearned for mental calm, for the peace of meditation, but he hadn't been able to find a centered enough place inside himself in days.

What they needed was a plan. What they needed was help. What they needed was the Iron Fist ...

"It's not your fault," Ward said quietly behind him.

Danny looked back. Ward gazed at him steadily, his fever-bright eyes burning in his pale face.

"I know it's not," Danny lied.

"Oh, bullshit. Listen, if I hadn't ended up with this --" Ward made an abortive attempt to move his bad arm, grimaced and let it fall back, the hand resting limply in his lap. "-- then you'd have a bullet through the _head_. Which, granted, could only have improved things up there ..." 

He smiled. Danny didn't return it, but after a minute he held out the gun to Ward, butt-first. "You should keep it here for protection." With that, Danny reached for Randall's gunbelt.

"Hey, whoa, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to climb one of these hills around here, climb a tree up there, and see if I can get cell reception."

"That's a terrible plan."

"You got a better one?" Danny asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Okay, no, so the shit plan is all we got, but taking the magic guns you don't know how to use isn't going to improve it any." Ward shoved his gun back in Danny's direction. "Take this one. It's not like they're _more_ likely to find me here than they are to find _you_ running around out in the jungle like an idiot."

Danny hesitated. Orson Randall's guns ... they _wanted_ to be used. He could tell. And he wanted that, wanted it with a desperation that was almost painful. The way it had _felt,_ when he'd turned around and drawn the guns and fired at Randall's pursuing thugs -- the light blazing through him, filling the empty places inside him where dragon's fire used to live --

And then he thought of Ward saying to him, months ago, _I've seen that same dragon, brother_ .... and he hung the guns back on the wall and wordlessly took the Sig Sauer butt-first from Ward, tucking it into his jacket pocket.

"Be careful, damn it," Ward said.

"You should go lay down."

"I will. In a minute."

"And eat something."

Ward leaned back against the wall and glared at Danny, but after a minute he unwrapped the granola bar and held the larger half in Danny's direction. Danny took it; it felt like a peace offering.

"I'll be back soon. I promise."

"Yeah, you better," Ward muttered. 

Whenever Danny looked back until the jungle swallowed him, he could see Ward watching him, fingers curled loosely around the half a granola bar in his lap, not eating.

 

***

 

The jungle canopy caught most of the rain, but it was still wet underneath, and clouds of insects rose from the damp foliage in those places where the fluttering wet leaves weren't actively unleashing streams of water down the back of Danny's collar.

Although he knew it was a risk, he paused occasionally to mark trees with a small slash of his pocketknife at knee height (a trick he'd learned from a skilled tracker in K'un Lun -- even most people skilled in woodcraft didn't look for signs at that level). Under the dense clouds, one hill looked much like another, and he couldn't help fretting about the idea of getting lost out here and being unable to find his way back to Ward. 

The slope of the land was a better guide than Danny's own limited woodcraft skills; as long as he kept going uphill on the way out, and downhill on the way back, he ought to do all right. But then he started hitting obstacles. At first it was nothing worse than dense thickets that he had to detour around, though they took him out of his way. Eventually, though, he hit a much bigger problem: a rushing stream, rain-swollen and muddy, churning at the tops of its banks.

Danny spent a half-hour or so going out of his way in both directions, looking for a place he could cross it, a fallen tree, anything. He finally gave up and was cutting a staff to probe the bottom when he thought, _What am I doing?_

Sure, he could try to ford the swollen creek, but that churning, opaque water could be full of anything. Snakes, floating logs, hidden holes in the creek bottom; all kinds of things that could get him swept away and drowned. And Ward was back in their hiding place, trusting Danny to come back. Trusting Danny to get them both out of his mess that Danny had gotten them into in the first place.

Danny sat down wearily on a moss-covered log -- he was _exhausted,_ legs shaking, desperately in need of proper food and sleep to recover the chi he'd burned up in Jakarta. He rested his elbows on his knees and his forehead against his clenched fists.

How many of Lei-Kung's lessons had been about not rushing into things, using his head, weighing all sides of a situation? _Think, young dragon. If there are two unattractive paths before you, look for the path between. There is always a middle way between rushing thoughtlessly into a situation and becoming so paralyzed with indecision that you do nothing._

Over the last few days -- heck, for most of his life -- he'd been vacillating between those two extremes, charging ahead or spinning his wheels in place, never just stopping to _think._ And Ward had been the one to pay the price. When he took a step back from the situation, Danny could see that he'd been so desperately fixated on getting to the top of the hill, where he might be able to use his phone and call for help, that he'd been willing to take any risk to get there. Even if it got him killed.

 _That_ wasn't the middle path, the moderate path.

He shoved back his wet hair and tilted his head back, rain pattering on his face. _Lei Kung, Shou-Lao, guide me._

But there was no guidance to be found in the low clouds and the mist wrapping the jungle-cloaked hills. Like the dark, burned-out channel in his soul, where dragon's fire had blazed, the connection he'd once felt to those who had trained him had attenuated with time and distance, faded away as _he_ had faded into a world that had taken the black-and-white he'd been raised with, and shaded it with a million different hues of gray.

Danny let out a slow breath and raised his hand to trace the familiar lines of the dragon tattoo burned into his chest. It still hurt sometimes; he wasn't sure if it was real, or a phantom pain, a lingering ghost of the searing agony as the dragon had marked his body and soul.

It frustrated him beyond bearing that before if he hadn't lost the Fist, he would have had the ability to help Ward. He had healed Colleen of poison, once. He could have done the same for Ward, purged the infection that was killing him. If he could do _that,_ their situation would still be unpleasant, but not so desperately dire. They could seek a way out of the jungle in a different direction, get back to Jakarta or a different town, and get off the island ...

But he couldn't heal. Not anymore. He'd once told Colleen that he wanted to be a light in darkness, not a weapon -- but he _was_ a weapon, with or without the Iron Fist. Maybe he had only been fooling himself all that time, thinking he could escape the destiny that had been seared into his flesh. The guns were a tangible symbol of it, and perhaps the ultimate proof. He'd sought a connection to dragonfire in the only way still open to him, risking Ward's life and his own to get his hands on a magical artifact that was _meant_ for killing things. The fierce yearning he felt when he was near them -- and if he was to be completely honest with himself, he wasn't sure if it came from the guns, or from him -- was the same urge that had driven him out onto the streets night after night, pushing him away from Colleen's side in search of a fight, and eventually driven him away from her forever ...

Danny clenched his fists until the knuckles turned white, and then he yelled aloud, his voice drowned in the roar of the flooded creek, and leaped to his feet and slammed a fist into the nearest tree. It did nothing, of course; it didn't even make him feel better. All he managed to do was scrape his knuckles on the bark.

As he leaned against the tree with his knuckles smarting and his chest aching, it seemed to him for a moment that he could almost hear Lei Kung's voice ringing in his ears: _And what IS the middle path, young dragon?_

Not running away. Not fighting. What was left?

And then he stared across the creek into the vivid green foliage, and he thought ... perhaps there _was_ another way.

If he could only make it work.

 

***

 

When Danny got back to the cluster of abandoned tin-roofed sheds, Ward was no longer sitting outside. Danny stopped for a minute, getting his breathing under control -- he'd all but run to get back; he was covered in leaves and mud, panting and bug-bitten and weary. Then he snagged the guns off their hook on the wall and went inside.

He stopped to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. From the far end of the shed, there was a gasp and Ward started to sit up on the pile of old feed sacks they'd used to make a bed, of sorts, on top of old timbers and branches to keep it off the muddy ground. Ward sank back, then, and said bitingly, "That's it, _don't_ announce yourself, just give me a heart attack. _Shit."_

"Sorry." Danny came over and sat on the edge of the pallet. This end of the shed was dimmer than the other, lit by shafts of wan gray daylight coming through cracks in the vertical boards that made up the walls. "Ward, I have an idea, but I bet you won't like it."

Ward's eyes glittered in the dim light, fever-bright. "I take it you didn't get reception."

"Didn't even make it to the top of the hill."

The glitter vanished as Ward wearily shut his eyes. "Well, thanks for trying, anyway."

The sudden capitulation was more alarming than Ward turning belligerent and cutting. "No, but -- Ward, listen." Danny laid a hand on his shoulder after taking a moment to make sure it wasn't the hurt side. He could feel the heat through Ward's damp shirt. Damn it, Ward was getting worse by the hour. He wished he'd thought of doing this days ago, when Ward wasn't sick and weak, when it would have had a better chance of working. "Ward, I want to try to heal you."

Ward's eyes cracked open. "Say what, now?"

"I did it with Colleen last year. She was poisoned and I used the Iron Fist to drive the poison from her body. That's all this is, Ward, really. It's a kind of poison. I can heal that."

"Yeah, but, correct me if I'm wrong here, Danny, because it's _only_ the reason why we're even here at all, but -- you can't use the Fist these days, right?"

"No, but I have these." Danny held up the gunbelt and gave it a shake.

Ward gave him one of those looks of bottomless sarcasm. "Danny, I'll be honest with you, I might get to the point where I want you to shoot me and put me out of my misery, but I'm not there yet."

"No, no, not like -- stop it. These let me channel my chi. I did it already, once, on the docks. And --" There were too many ideas crowding his head, ideas he couldn't put into words. Ideas about _not_ being a weapon, about swords and ploughshares, about the fact that maybe Orson Randall had used these guns to kill people, but Danny didn't have to. A hammer could be used to build a house or kill a man. These guns let him tap into the well of dragonfire that had been cut off from him, and he _knew_ he could use it to heal; he just had to figure it out again.

"Danny ..." Ward pushed himself up on his good elbow. In the dim light, his face was lightly sheened with sweat, although it wasn't warm. "I've seen you use those things exactly once, and then you turned white and fell over, and I had to escape from Jakarta _carrying_ you. And I hate to break it to you, but you don't exactly look like you're in tip-top health right now. I don't _like_ those odds."

"I don't like sitting here and watching you get worse when there might be something I can do about it."

"Heal me with magic chi-channeling guns," Ward said, his voice, weak and hoarse as it was, dripping with industrial-grade sarcasm.

"Yes," Danny said flatly, with all the determination he could muster for the frankly insane thing he was planning, and he laid the gunbelt down on the feed sacks. The cracked leather belt curled around the twin holsters like the sprawling coils of a cobra. Danny closed his hand over the butt of one of the guns, and felt the hunger, the wanting, the _need_ \-- from the gun, from his own severed soul; it hardly mattered, he thought, when the important thing was what he did with it.

 _You're mine now,_ he thought at the guns. _You're going to do what I tell you._

"So you've done this before," Ward said nervously, as Danny laid his hand lightly across Ward's bandages and sought his inner calm, the trance state he needed. "You healed Colleen."

"Yeah," Danny said absently. "Bakuto helped me."

" _Bakuto?_ Bakuto of the Hand? The one who tried to kill you?"

"This was before he tried to kill me."

"Okay, so ... not exactly inspiring confidence here, but ..." Ward made a sharp, gasping noise, and Danny realized he'd tightened his grip and eased up on it. "So -- you did it with help before. Can you actually --"

"Ward, I'm trying to concentrate on something that's not exactly easy, so if you could please be quiet and let me focus --"

Ward pushed himself up again, dislodging Danny's hand and jarring him, once again, out of his attempt to reach a meditative state. "The last time you did anything with the guns, you passed out and you're _still_ not better, and I'm not exactly in a good position to be the only one of us who's compos mentis right now!"

"I can't promise I'm not going to pass out," Danny said, exasperated, "because I did with the Colleen thing too, but --"

"Okay, what, so this is a regular thing with you?"

"It's not exactly _easy,_ but Bakuto showed me how to do it without killing myself, so --"

"Wait, this could _kill_ you?"

"Ward," Danny said. He planted his hand in the middle of Ward's chest -- heat under his palm, and sweat-sticky shirt, and the bones of Ward's chest, as if he'd lost weight noticeably in just three days. Danny pushed him down; there was a moment of terribly weak resistance and then capitulation. "This isn't going to kill me." (He was mostly sure of that.) "Let me try this."

"Try," Ward said, flat on his back under Danny's hand. He bent his good arm and closed his hand over Danny's wrist, the fingers cold despite the heat that Danny could feel baking out of him. "I like that word, 'try.' Especially in this context."

"Shhh. I need to concentrate."

"Can I help?" Ward asked quietly, as Danny held the pistol grip in his other hand and tried to find that place inside himself where the fire had been, that place that had, at one time, felt like the center of his soul.

"Just ..." Danny began, and Ward's hand tightened on Danny's wrist -- and it _did_ help, somehow; it seemed to help ground the circuit he was trying to forge. "Just don't move."

He closed his eyes and reached down inside himself, reaching for that connection. The pistol grip seemed to writhe in his grasp; it didn't _want_ to be used how he was using it. _Yeah, what you want doesn't matter. I just need to reach the fire, and I know you can give it to me._

It was _there._ It was so close. He wanted it, needed it; the ache was like a desperate thirst in the deepest part of his soul. And for a dangerous instant, he didn't even care how he got it -- he just _needed_ it, he would do anything to possess it, he would sell his soul to the guns if he could only have that fire in his soul for another minute --

Ward's cold fingers pressed against his wrist, and Danny gritted his teeth, grounding himself on the feeling of Ward's hand and the knowledge of what he had to do, and how, and why. 

He _would_ be the master, not the conduit. The guns offered a channel for his chi, but _he_ would be the one in control. He was not a weapon unless he wanted to be, not a tool of K'un-Lun. He controlled the guns, not the other way around.

He was a circuit struggling to close, an incomplete symphony -- but he would finish this on _his_ terms. It was not raw skill but stubbornness that had gotten him all the way to Shou-Lao's lair, and it was the same stubbornness that made him refuse to yield to what the guns wanted from him -- whatever they were, whatever they could do, it would be by _his_ will, not theirs.

And what he needed now was not killing, but healing.

When the fire roared into his soul and washed over him and burned away all his doubts, it was his core of stubbornness that hung onto that raw need and tamed the fire no matter how it burned. Consciousness contracted down to a pinprick but he _had_ that twisting, turning fire in his grasp, it was his, he didn't _have_ to be what they'd made him, and the guns weren't the thing they'd made to be either; they were his now, they would be what _he_ made _them_ , and he took that fire and shaped it and channeled it and drew on everything he'd learned from Lei Kung, from Bakuto -- it _would_ bend to his will, it would burn as he wished it. He held onto it and shaped it (like holding a dragon's breath in his bare hands) and it hurt but in a good way, as he made the fire burn what he _wanted_ it to burn -- not with Bakuto's guidance this time, but with his own soul to direct and redirect it, even as it burned his soul away where it touched and it burned and it burned and it BURNED --

 

***

 

There was darkness and there was pain, and there was a voice saying his name, and that was what he followed back up to the world.

"-- Danny, I swear to God, if you don't _say something_ , I will publish your darkest secrets on the Internet, don't think I won't --"

"Ward," Danny said, on a breath, and hauled himself out of the darkness with a physical effort, back to the world where his body hurt in every bone, and he was so hungry it was an ache that consumed him. There was a strangely appetizing smell in the air, and he half lifted himself and then collapsed again.

"Jesus," Ward said. He was sitting next to the feed-sack pallet with his hand on Danny's arm. "You're an idiot."

"You're better," Danny said hopefully. Ward _looked_ better. A lot better. His hand, on Danny's arm, was steady and firm. "You're better, right?"

"You passed out and I couldn't wake you up and I couldn't even tell if you were _breathing --"_ Ward gave Danny's arm a sharp shake.

"But," Danny said doggedly, "you're better."

"A lot better," Ward admitted. He sounded angry about it. "You've been asleep for over a day."

"Oh," Danny said. He couldn't really think what else to say; he was just ... tired, down to his bones, like he'd been scraped out from the inside.

Ward seemed to be taking this in; his face changed, in some subtle way Danny couldn't quite follow, and then he patted Danny's arm and said, "Stay there."

He was back in a few minutes with something on a piece of flattened tin. "You awake?" he said, and Danny pushed himself up on his elbows. He was so weak that his arms trembled.

"What _is_ that?" In the dim light of the shed, he couldn't tell what Ward was holding out to him, but it smelled good and he was suddenly, ragingly aware of his hunger.

"Meat," Ward said. "I shot a pig." He sounded inordinately pleased with himself.

"You ... did what, now?"

"Shot a pig, a wild pig. It was just sniffing around outside the shed. One shot. You're not the only one with wilderness survival skills. There's plenty more where this came from. And yeah, I know, trichinosis, but I've been trying to cook the hell out of it --"

Right now, Danny couldn't care less; the charred, slightly underdone-in-the-middle pork was the best thing he'd ever tasted. Ward brought him more, and he ate until his stomach cramped and then curled on his side and slept again, vaguely aware of Ward nearby, never very far away.

He woke again to actual sunlight this time, the dim gold of late afternoon shining through the cracks in the shed, and Ward shaking his shoulder. "Danny, hey, wake up. I need you to translate."

Danny squinted up at him. "Huh?"

"There's a guy out there -- not one of Orson's guys, at least I don't think so, more like a sort of a ... farmer-looking guy, I think he's local, and he keeps yelling at me, but I can't understand a word he's saying. Can you come translate?"

Danny let that sink in, and thought about it for a minute, and then struggled to sit up. "At a guess, it's probably something along the lines of 'you shot my pig.'"

"... How was I supposed to know? It wasn't like it had a collar on it!"

 

***

 

So they paid for the pig, and once they managed to make it clear that they were lost American tourists with money rather than lost hobos or gangsters, the farmer and his entire family warmed up to them immensely, and let them stay overnight in a cramped and smoky farmhouse before pointing them down a farm road that led to the coastline and a small port town where they could hire a boat. They got a ride with another of the local farmers who was going to town to sell chickens, which meant they spent six hours riding in the back of a jolting, rusty farm truck with a bunch of chickens, most of which were in wooden cages, but not all.

"This is the worst road trip ever," Ward said, removing a chicken from his lap. He still had his injured arm tucked inside his jacket, but his color was almost back to normal and as far as Danny could tell from surreptitiously watching him, he could move the fingers on that hand and was starting to use it again.

Danny had bundled up the guns in his pack to avoid anyone seeing them, and he was faintly aware of them there, but not in the same hungry way as earlier. They were kind of just ... there. He still wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen the next time he used them, but he was confident he could do it without hurting anybody, this time. 

Or collateral damage. He looked over at Ward again. Ward had come very close to dying, and it hadn't been the first time on this trip.

"You could go back," Danny said. Ward gave him a quick, sharp look. "You _should_ go back. When we get somewhere that has an airport --"

"Back to New York, you mean?" Ward said, and Danny nodded. "Back to running Rand, back to three-piece suits and meetings with investors, back to dry socks and --" He picked up the hen, which had nestled down in his lap again (she probably liked that he was warm, Danny thought) and dropped her in the truck bed. "-- and not a _single_ taxi with chickens in it, _that_ New York?"

"Back to where you'd be safe," Danny said.

"Safe like I was when the Hand tried to murder both of us, a zombie version of my dad tormented me for years, and my dad killed your parents?"

Danny took a breath, held it for a minute, and then he said, "That last one happened in China," and Ward huffed out a small laugh and then looked away.

A few moments passed, measured out in potholes, and then Ward said, "You've already proven you have the survival instincts of a lemming; I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if you were on your own."

"You don't have to keep doing this out of guilt, Ward --"

"Oh, knock it off," Ward said, kicking his ankle. "It's not all about you, Danny." After another brief silence, he said, "Remember that beach house in ... where _was_ that, anyway? The place where those little girls made flower crowns for you, and we got lost looking for the steakhouse I wanted to go to and found that amazing seafood restaurant instead, with the stone railing."

"That was Patong, I think."

"Yeah. This has ... it's ..." He fell quiet again, but he'd left his foot resting against Danny's, on the jolting floor of the truck bed. "There hasn't really been ... a whole lot of _good_ in my life, not for awhile, maybe not ever, really. Little bits here and there, but ..." He looked over at Danny suddenly, startling Danny not with the sudden glance but with the warmth in his eyes. "This -- a lot of it's been good. And sure, a lot hasn't, and I mean, if I _had_ to choose between going back to three-piece suits and investor meetings, I'd probably pick that over dying in the jungle, I have to admit, but if you throw in that pack of legal jackals from Hogarth, Chao and Benowitz, I think it might turn out to be a toss-up."

Danny had more-or-less learned to roll with Ward's dark sense of humor by now, but he still had to struggle to scrape up a slight smile to return the quick grin Ward flashed him; the memory of Ward almost dying in the jungle was a little too sharp right now.

"The point is, there's been a lot that's good," Ward said, tapping the side of his boot against Danny's. "And anyway, I'm not dropping out now without seeing this all the way through."

They rode like that for a little while, and then Danny said thoughtfully, "I should get a coat. Like a long one, something to cover up the guns so I can actually keep them handy in case we get into a fight. Maybe a long leather one, I always wanted something like that. It'd look so cool. Did you ever watch cowboy movies, Ward?"

"Do you even listen to yourself?"

"I think Colleen would like a coat like that. Don't you?"

"I think I regret every life choice that led me to this," Ward said, plucking a chicken feather out of his hair. But a few minutes later, he was the one who started a playful game of "I Spy," and they kept that up all the way to the coast.


End file.
